1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer system. Specifically, the present invention relates to a method for updating the basic input/output system (hereinafter “BIOS”) and a computer system using the same.
2. Description of Related Art
Due to the rapid development of personal computers, new peripheral equipments are introduced to the market rapidly. BIOS needs to be updated frequently to enhance the computing speed and function of computer systems, to solve the deficiencies or error of hardware design, or to recover the damage of the BIOS content caused by computer viruses. During the process of updating the BIOS, if a sudden power failure arises, the entire content of the BIOS will be damaged, resulting in failure boot of the computer system. The computer system needs to be sent back to the manufacturer to restore the BIOS.
There are lots of techniques for protecting the BIOS. For example, in a single-BIOS system, a hardware mechanism is deployed to protect the boot block in the BIOS to prevent the aforementioned situation from happening and damage the boot lock. However, the flaw of the method is that the boot block in the BIOS cannot be updated.
Take dual-BIOS as another example. When one of the BIOS is damaged, the computer system may use the other BIOS to boot the system. Because the computer system already has two BIOS, no hardware protection for the boot block of the BIOS is needed. Therefore, even if the boot block of one BIOS is damaged, the computer system can still be booted by the other BIOS, and recover the damaged BIOS. While such method may have resolved the flaw of the aforementioned method, dual-BIOS is needed to implement such conventional technique. Thus, the required cost of the hardware of the computer system is higher.
Therefore, in order to prevent a dramatic increase in the cost and the time for entirely recycling the hardware system for replacement or update, the industry needs to provide faster and more instant methods to update the BIOS in personal computer systems. In other words, a technique to automatically recover the BIOS content when the original BIOS content is entirely damaged, is needed.